John Flinchbaugh Photography: Photography

Concerts: Pixel 6 Pro vs Sony a6000

28 January 2023

I’ve been photographing clubs, local concerts, and everything else in an amateur capacity with my array of Sony a6000 cameras for over 8 years often with the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8. That camera technology is old but it serves me well.

I’ve also been photographing more recently with my Pixel 6 Pro. The 3 lenses of different focal length and the digital zoom are surprisingly capable. The software does a really nice job cleaning up noise in low light most the time or picking the cleanest shot of a sequence.

Below I show 2 photos from the real camera and 2 images from the phone. Looking close on a big screen, I can tell the difference, but it’s pretty good. Having seen how the phone deals with image noise, I learned I can get away with some heavier noise reduction in my camera images.

full resolution

full resolution

Workflow for 360 Video

06 January 2023

I’ve been using the Insta360 X3 for a couple months, and I’m settling into an optimal workflow for processing all the video on my phone. Initially, I’d shoot hours of video straight and try to edit it, but this offered lots of challenges:

It requires a very large SD card.
It burns lots of battery.
It leaves me with hours of video to review and process.
Hours of video in Insta360’s mobile app cause slowdown and crashes when editing a huge "Story".

Currently I’ve been taking the recent approach:

I mount the camera on the selfie stick attached to my bicycle handlebars or a strap on my chest, since I’m not good at riding and holding the camera by hand. This gives me the look of a drone flying ahead of me.
I run USB power to the camera from a power bank to keep the camera running longer than 45 minutes. The cable runs down the side of the camera, so mostly disappears in the stitch line.
I only capture the interesting bits. I put the camera in "Loop Recording" mode keeping 1-minute clips. When I see something I want to keep, I stop the recording to keep the loop of the last minute or 2, and I’ll immediately restart the recording. This leaves me with usually 20-40 small clips.
I leave the gigabytes of video on the camera, and connect the mobile app running on my phone to the camera via Bluetooth and WiFi Direct.
I process each small clip from oldest to newest:
- I open each individual clip, and I see if there’s anything there worth keeping. I delete it if I don’t recognize anything notable, so I don’t need to process it later.
- For the bit in the file that’s worth keeping, I reframe it in the app.
- Then I aggressively trim the video to be 4-20 seconds long using the "jump cut" feature in the trim tool.
Once all the clips are ready, I create a new "Story" and start adding batches of short clips in chronological order. They’re already trimmed and reframed, so I see how the clips flow, and trim or delete even further, and maybe add a transition or two between clips.
After many passes of trimming the clips that comprise a story, I can export the resulting video, usually only a few minutes in length, to the filesystem on the phone.

I try to keep the videos as short as possible, since no one wants to watch a boring 20 minutes. I’ll also likely export a single clip or two as highlights to upload to Instagram. The full-length video goes to Youtube.

Best Images of 2021

08 October 2022

Best Images of 2020

07 January 2021

Not a whole lot of photography happened in 2020, but I made some images that are meaningful to me. I made it to a party or two, traveled to Las Vegas with Emily, and made senior portraits for Marie.